Salt (24 page)

‘Eel ain't done,' the first twin said, wiping smoke from his eyes with the sleeve of his smock. ‘More o' this and the macks'll be dry - '

‘OK, Cliff, you've said your piece,' Kipper said, cutting him short.

The first twin, the one called Cliff, shrugged and looked to his brother. They had the same face all right, shadowed under the eyes and thin across the forehead. Cliff had the air of being the elder brother though. He stood with his leg forward and had draped his arm over the pipe like it was a rifle.

‘Pint?' the other one asked.

‘Yeah,' Cliff said. ‘We'll do the hocks in the morning.'

‘You crease me up, you do,' Kipper said. ‘Off you go then.'

The two lads grinned at each other and walked off towards Cley, leaving my father and uncle on the lawn. My father went to his car, searching for his keys in his dungarees pockets.

‘Had too much to drink, haven't you?' Kipper said.

‘You can stop that,' my father replied, his cheeks flushed at a half-turn towards his brother. ‘You can't speak to me like you do them twins.'

‘Yeah?'

‘Why don't you just spit it out?'

‘Off you go, Shrimp.'

‘Don't call me that,' my father said, his back clearly tensing.

My uncle leaned against the wall, apparently satisfied to have riled his brother.

‘All I'm saying,' Kipper begins darkly, ‘is you lost one woman already. You gotta act responsibly.'

My father went to his car shaking his head.

‘Face up to it, Shrimp.'

‘I said don't call me that.' And with that he drove off

 

It was the run-up to Christmas. The pigs were being pickled in vats on Kipper's lawn, the trout was in his smokehouse, and Norfolk was turning effortlessly from harvest to slaughter. Ducks flew off the ponds into an air spitting with leadshot, pheasants were snared in the hedges, geese strangled in farmers' hands. In low factory sheds turkeys were rammed into crates by the thousand, loaded on to lorries and driven to meat processors. A time of year when Gideon cried each day for the shame of it, the sheer crime of all this killing. We've lost our way in life, we have no map.

In the damp winter shadows of the
Thistle Dew
, Bryn carves a figure of Ol' Norse from a beam of sea-defence groyne. His knife works at the hard wood, giving the old devil the wide snarling grin of a dogfish, cheeks covered in scales and bladderwrack for his hair. It's become an obsession, the two of them in that tiny cramped room, spending the winter together, Bryn getting warm by chipping away at the wood, Ol' Norse looking back, grinning at the folly of it like some hideous gargoyle. It's a dance of death. In the larders of Norfolk the pheasants are hung for the meat to darken. The hocks on Kipper's lawn are turned in their graves, drained, salted and finally smoked. And as the face of Ol' Norse begins to emerge from the sea wood - a face of malign intent and utter mischief - the turkeys reach their end, clipped to a moving track, hung by their feet, because a turkey will fight and stamp till the bitter end but when it's upside down it will enter that dream-state so close to death. And close to death they are, because the track moves with a gentle motion to a slaughter that is so simple, so devastating: a pair of pincers, which mechanically removes their heads. Below them a trench as large as a swimming pool fills with blood and is emptied on to the field each night. Someone has to shovel those heads up by the thousand, someone has to open the sluice and gaze at the bird blood as it drains away. The sodium lights of the factory reflect on the pool's surface like a Norfolk sunset, a dark wide stain on the field outside where all this blood has returned, silently, to Norfolk's heart.

Left behind is a county scraped clear of its leaves, soil cracked bare by the frost, woods silent and haunted by their own loss of life. Bark, flint, chalk, all dead, all retreated into a relentless winter numbness. The north wind arrives, bringing with it the menacing scent of the sea, so wild and untamed, sweeping down, marshalling anyone brave enough to bundle themselves up in winter coats through the draughty alleyways of coastal towns. They turn up their collars and lean into it, into all it has to offer, then huddle themselves in places like the Albatross, nursing a pint and sharing their trauma, staring at the warm cosy glow behind the glass panes of the log burner. They complain, remembering other winters, then as the months go on the winter beats even complaint from them.

By February the men have drunk their way through and there's not much left to them. There's salt on their skins. They're fed up. They've forced themselves to survive but there's still an ache out there, all round, the sky's as tight as a drum with a frozenness they can't quite reach, but which all of them know is reaching out for them.

Then something relaxes. They count the coffin dodgers who've made it against the odds. The birds turn up from God-knows-where, oblivious and stupid in their routines.

And whatever the weather, come rain, sleet and driving wind, I'm out on the marsh, running the flats of thrift, purslane, lavender and samphire, jumping the creeks, wading through the Pit to reach the Point. There, among the seas of marram and lyme, surrounded all round by water, I was able to speak. First I coughed up the sound I'd made in Gideon's kitchen, then odd-throated noises like a dog's growl, and slowly, one by one, I shaped the noises till I strung a
gurgh
and an
ell
into
gull
, and, soon after, a
sea-ll
, a
p-it
and, finally, a long-drawn-out
hann-sa
. A coarse noise emerging between dunes and reeds, neither male nor female nor seal nor bird. The very voice my grandmother said had haunted her on the Point all her life.

I'd decided to keep my voice secret. If I started to speak, I'd end up at the local school. Once, and once only, I'd been taken there - Kipper's idea - to see what would happen. He's a tough 'un, Goose, see if he ain't, he says. What happened was I sat at the back of the class, friendless, rubbing the tops of my shoes on the backs of my trousers and thinking the last time I'd been put in glossy polished shoes was for my mother's funeral. The children turned to stare at me when the teacher wrote on the blackboard. I was just the latest generation to come out of a mad family to them. They spoke in unison when the teacher said How do we do? and then flocked to the door when a bell rang. The teacher made me write in the notebook hung round my neck, and then showed the class some of my drawings of birds and seals. Pufter! a girl said, and because she said that I was surrounded at lunchtime by four girls, all younger and bigger than me, who told me my mother was Lil' Mardler,
who always told lies and then she killed herself
.

Yes, that's what happened. Me watching their mean-lipped mouths chanting:

 

Tough luck, Kipper. You're going to learn the hard way about me. It takes more than a half-baked idea to change my ways. And your next idea wasn't so great either, thinking you'd have a go at teaching me yourself, three days a week, like Cassie Crowe, that crayon-stealer who'd managed - against the odds - to teach me to write. Goose wasn't happy, probably because education had never worked for her, and partly because she thought it'd be harder for her to unlearn the rubbish Kipper would fill my head with.

On the first day she not only walked with me to his house, but sat in the living room while Kipper fussed with books and pens and arranged the right chair by a window which had good enough light but not too much of a view. Goose flattened her skirt across her knees and gazed at her hands as if they were an old pair of gardening gloves she was thinking of chucking. She crossed one foot behind the other. An oddly formal pose. Indoor spaces made her nervous. She knocked out her pipe on the fireplace and Kipper turned his smoky gaze on her, smiling and saying get out in those creeks where you belong, mud-woman. Don't lissen to none of it, she said, on her way out. Then we watched her in the yard as she hauled open the smokehouse door and helped herself to a bloater, which she wrapped, still smoking, under her coat.

‘Bloody woman,' Kipper said, his voice tight and not quite managing to be humorous. ‘I'll tell you straight off,' he added, ‘don't you let me down. There's plenty round here ready to string me up for stuff I have or haven't done. Shrimp ain't no use to no one, not you and not himself, so you're up to me now.' Laying down the law made him embarrassed. He picked a flint fossil off the mantelpiece, turned it over in his hands, placed it back, readjusted it to leave no sign of ever touching it. ‘Well that's about it,' he said, running out of steam. Then he left.

 

Two books on the desk:, first, a hardbacked book with gold lettering down its spine:
The Scientific Adventurer
. An introduction that began:

 

If you have never seen potassium burning pure in a bowl of water, never watched droplets of mercury running into each other, never seen flowers of iron filings on a magnet's poles or grown alum crystals in a jam jar, then I, dear reader, envy you. I wish I could see these things for the first time once again. But our bags are packed and our guidebook is open. So let our adventure begin. Kipper had underlined the last sentence with a sharp pencil. The second book was a blue-and-white paperback called
Myths and Legends of the Classical World
. I read about Neptune, banished from the land, dwelling in coral caves, stirring up storms, inhabiting a world of water and salt. That's you, Kipper Langore, that's you all right, living on a land you neither like nor trust. Caught in-between the elements in a little fishy puff of smoke.

I sat there, at the desk, in a room that had an evening feel whatever the time of day. Driftwood was piled around here and there, all of it salt-withered, the whole space feeling like it had been preserved, unnaturally, years ago. I felt like the cockchafer impaled on its pin in my father's study. The only disturbances were the flies that circled silently below the main light, moving in strangely straight lines, taking sudden corners as if they were bouncing off an air more solid than they were used to.

I thought of Gideon, whispering his sermon about losing the map in life. That we need a moral map to see our way through. That without it, we are lost. Of his thin fingers pointing to Psalms and Ecclesiastes with a slight tremble, his eyes watery with his message. He's so tormented by Norfolk's biblical landscapes and the saints he sees in them he draws himself into the barn where he imagines Lot's incest still continues. I read about Lot in Kipper's Bible. I read about Sodom's destruction, how Lot's wife had looked back and turned into a pillar of salt, how Abraham had seen the smoke of the country going up as the smoke of a furnace.

Salt in the ground. Smoke in the sky.

I thought of my mother's mysterious flower patterns in her garden, of Goose staring at clouds and determining her life and the lives of others. All of them - even Hands, studying the map of the North Sea so he could escape Norfolk, where had it got him? To the fishes. All of them - with God or without God, searching for the map which will see them through.

In all these stories, with all these predictions from clouds and maps and Bibles, where was my route through it all?
The Scientific Adventurer
had no answer. And the
Myths and Legends of the Classical World?
A secret here - I saw myself as Oedipus, even then, as I read the details of his story. Hadn't I, after all, been hung up by my ankles in my father's shed? We'll get the bugger back. Some day, my mother whispers as she bathes my swollen feet. Hadn't I faced choices at a place called Three Holes, run away from home to avoid my father? Hadn't my hand closed around switchblade razors in my pocket?

 

I spend the months in that room, reading his books and eating his fish. This strip of saltmarshes between the land and sea has become my home. It's a year since my mother died, and my trousers are beginning to look too short - there's no one to let the hem down any more. I sit there, at my desk, surrounded by Kipper's books, my trouser hem getting shorter and shorter as the months and then the years pass. I'm growing in that cocoon of his.

 

On a hot day just after my thirteenth birthday, I stumble out into the sunlight of a July afternoon. I remember the day because it's the same day a young woman wolf-whistles me as I pass Blakeney Quay. When she whistles again I see her hair like a sudden burst of flame. Elsie, leaning against a small hatchback car, sucking a lolly.

15

The
Hansa

El-see
, two syllables of a word I'd never managed to say.
El
, so easy, so effortless to put by
see
, as in
seal
, as in
sea
. But never achieved. Though I tried, out there among the dunes, invoking the thin, reedy voice to conjure the word . . . I'll tell the truth: I never dared to.

And here she is, on the edge of the quay, in the centre of things. In a baggy red velvet coat with soldier's buttons, though it's too hot for that. Bright long blancmange-pink leggings and wrists full of bangles that make a noise when she moves her arms. I couldn't keep her young for ever. I'm thirteen. She's twenty.

I sit in her hatchback car and it's full of sweet wrappers and has the smell of a long warm journey in it. She spins the wheels on the gravel and laughs too loudly at that. Behind us, the stones spit off the quay edge into the creek, but it doesn't matter because Elsie's driving me up the High Street and she's driving like a man, one hand holding the gear stick and the other turning the wheel. Always the tomboy. She smells of cigarettes and boiled sweets and she thinks all this is really funny. Her hair's shorter. It's thicker, less full of the multicoloured strands I remembered. Life and its colours get tarnished.